Guess the return on delegation will stay juicy for quite a while, as it's more of a "poweruser" thing right now.

Hmm poweruser really? It's seems silly to me to think of someone as a power user even if they literally only made an account so they could delegate a large amount of Steem to SmartSteem and then log in once every couple of weeks to withdraw their earnings.

Re. self voting:
It's actually not that bad to give people some initial incentive to invest in steem. Also, the focus needs to be on making it more enticing to use your power on others, not "regulating" it. People who want to abuse the system will find a way, they vast majority does not.

People need to understand how the system actually works. It's not abuse or a loophole if they literally designed it to work that way. You have all these people that think the problem isn't just involved with self voting and involved with vote-bots, but that problem itself IS with self voting and vote-bots.

I don't understand how this meme that "self voting" is a loophole or an abuse of the system can exist, and for so long, when the devs literally programmed in a check box to automatically upvote yourself when you post a new blog post.

From what I see, most peoples logic about what's an abuse of the system would also cover the very basics of the system! This would be ok if they realised that because then we might get somewhere.

We could blame it on a lack of education of how Steemit works but I think it really comes down to the upvote being thought of in the same way as Reddit upvotes, YouTube thumbs ups, or Facebook likes. Consequently it's very easy to think it's unfair and "cheating" just using the system as it was intended. The reality is Steemit's upvote is hardly anything like a Reddit upvote or YouTube thumbs up except superficially. With those, every upvote or like is worth the same as each other and so can be used to know what sort of content is popular.

On Steemit the element quite literally making a post of a higher value isn't based on any variable that has anything to do with peoples opinion of the content itself. You're shown how many votes and the reward figure, but only 1 of the voters could be responsible for the entire reward while the rest of them could have flagged it. Upvotes in Steemit are much more like advertising which we don't expect to reflect quality or popularity, even if they spent a lot on it. Only it's not just like advertising either as advertising is an expense which insentivises people to not spend money promoting things that wouldn't end up being considered more valuable than what was paid to advertise them. With Steemit it's like advertising that not only pays for itself, but which is also the reward at the same time!

We know that when we see reddit posts with thousands of upvotes trending or Facebook posts with dozens or more likes that we expect this to reflect a number of peoples opinions about it. We'd know that's not going to be the case if technically 1 person could be responsible for all the upvotes or 100% of the likes.

In short we haven't figured out what the upvote really stands for, and its superficial similarity to something else we're very used to which it has very little relationship to otherwise is leading to a lot of confusion.